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Cultura. International Journal of of Culture and Axiology 15(2)/2018: 13-29

How the Concept of “” Emerged and Evolved in Modern

Zhongjiang WANG Department of Philosophy and of Religious Studies 5 Yiheyuan Road, Beijing, China [email protected]

Abstract: The entrance of “nature” from English to Chinese and the transformation of the word 自然 in Chinese had been intertwined together. In the formal process, “nature” was not translated as ziran at first while in the latter process, the western concept and Chinese ideas of nature combined together with multiple, comprehensive meanings in the history of modern China. This means the second process consists some major transformations of ziran as a key concept in modern China. Firstly, it has been a process of materialization for the traditional concept of ziran from ancient China. Secondly, traditional ideas of nature like , tianran, ziran, got revived during their association and collaborations with western understandings of nature as a concept of naturalist philosophy. Thirdly, it was also in this process where a humanistic and existential definition of ziran began to emerge, not only as a response to the materialized understanding of ziran, but also created the confrontation between a material occidental civilization and a spiritual oriental civilization. This dualist view not only ignored other thought like Romantism, Humanism and ideas which go against materialism or scientism, but also overlooked materialism and scientism itself in the history of Modern China. Keywords: modern China, ziran, physics, tian, humanistic

In the history of modern China, a series of critical terms and concepts were proposed and introduced into as a result of the cultural fusion between the East and the West, among which “nature” was the most notable one. However, we are still not clear about how the concept of “nature,” among other things, emerged and evolved and the role it played in modern Chinese philosophical thinking. For instance, how was “nature” translated in early English-Chinese dictionaries? When did “ziran” (with the original meaning of spontaneity) become the Chinese equivalent of “nature”? Was this translation influenced by its Japanese counterpart? How did Chinese modern thinkers understand and interpret “nature” and the indigenous idea of “spontaneity”? To be honest, we know little about the answers to these questions. As the introduction of the Western concept of “nature” coincided and interacted with the

This is an open access publication. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. 13

© 2018 Zhongjiang WANG https://doi.org/10.3726/cul.2018.02.02 Zhongjiang WANG / How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved… intellectual evolution of “ziran” and they together constituted the historical context of the emergence of “nature” as a philosophical notion in modern China, my discussion will focus on the history of the translations of “nature” and “natural” in Chinese reference books of this period as well as the historical changes of how Chinese thinkers comprehended and applied the concept of “nature” in their arguments.

I. DEFINITIONS OF “NATURE” IN ENGLISH-CHINESE DICTIONARIES OF THE LATE PERIOD: FROM “INSTINCT”, “HEAVEN AND EARTH”, “INBORN FORM”, TO “NATURE”

As complicated ideas, both “nature” in the Western context and “spontaneity” that is indigenous to China have a long history and varied implications (Lovejoy, 1996: 567-580). In modern Chinese history, they encountered and endowed each other with a new life. It was only after this process of integration that Chinese people started to understand and explain “nature” within the paradigm of “spontaneity.” Nowadays, in any commonly-used English-Chinese dictionaries, when it comes to the word “nature,” the corresponding Chinese definitions always include “nature,” “the Mother Nature”, “the natural world,” or “the natural force”; as for words like “natural” and “naturalism”, people are also used to their Chinese counterparts, such as “ziranjie ” (of the natural world), “guanyu ziranjie de” (about the natural world), “ziranzhuyi de” (naturalist), and so on. As it turns out, there was no equivalent of “nature” in pre-modern China, and therefore early English-Chinese dictionaries tended to paraphrase it with related concepts, which marked an inevitable stage of the formation and evolution of “nature” as a modern Chinese term. Foreign missionaries who lived in Hong Kong and Macao served as a cultural bridge that connected China with the West as they took the lead to compile a variety of English-Chinese dictionaries that exerted profound influence on modern . Some early representatives of these works included The English-Chinese Dictionary by Morrison (Macau: Printed at the Honorable East India Companies Press, 1822), English and Chinese Vocabulary in the Court Dialect by S. W. Williams (Macau: Xiangshan College, 1844), The English-Chinese Dictionary by W. H. Medhurst (: Mohai Book Company, 1847-1848), and The English-Chinese Dictionary by W. Lobscheid (Hong kong: Printed an Published at the Daily Press, 1865),

14 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 15(2)/2018: 13-29 followed by the Enchiridion Of English And Chinese Dictionary (compiled by Wu Zhijian and prefaced by . Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1904), The Great English-Chinese Dictionary (compiled by , et al. and also prefaced by Yan Fu. Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1908), and so on. According to the explanations and translations of “nature” in the aforementioned dictionaries, the English adjective “natural” was identified with “ziran de” (natural) from the beginning; however, the Chinese equivalent of “nature” was not “ziran” but some other philosophical terms drawn from ancient Chinese thoughts (with the exception of that offered by The Great English-Chinese Dictionary). Generally speaking, the dictionaries defined “nature” mainly in five aspects. Firstly, “nature” referred to the “instinctive principle,” “human nature,” “the reason,” or “the .” Secondly, it stood for “the Heaven and Earth,” “the Cosmos,” and “the Dominator.” Thirdly, it indicated the operation and movement of the heaven and earth. Fourthly, it had a bearing on the qualities and categories of things. Fifthly, it represented humanity, including the personality and talents of human beings. These definitions undoubtedly reflected how the dictionary compilers perceived “nature.” In the same vein, the explanations of “natural” also embodied five dimensions of meanings. In the first place, it was an equivalent of “instinctive.” Next, it could be used to describe things that were “original,” “inborn,” “inartificial,” and “unrestrained.” Third, it had an implication similar to that of “complying with the nature.” Moreover, it was related to one’s disposition and personality. Lastly, it dealt with a particular quality or aptitude. Unlike “nature,” “natural” was translated into Chinese as “ziran de” in most dictionaries except for English -Chinese Vocabulary in the Court Dialect along with “tianran de” (of the original form). On this account, it could be inferred that “ziran de” and “tianran de” are synonyms in the eyes of the compilers. In terms of the English-Chinese dictionaries, Chinese people comprehended “nature” mainly from the perspectives of the inner nature of things (the reason and the instinct) and natural objects or entities (the Heaven and Earth and the Cosmos). The fact that they did not opt for the indigenous Chinese word “spontaneity” to convey the meaning of “nature” could be partly attributed to its inability to denote substantive things at the very beginning. Then one may wonder why The Great English and Chinese Dictionary published in 1908 employed “ziran” to translate “natureness,”

15 Zhongjiang WANG / How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved… and from then on, more and more dictionaries translated “nature” as “ziran,” which eventually became a standardized translation? Was this change influenced by Japanese? Or was the term “nature” in modern China originally a Japanese-made Chinese word? In early Dutch-Japanese and English-Japanese dictionaries, “nature” was usually not translated as “shizen” in Japanese, a phenomenon that also occurred in China. For example, the translations of “nature” were “properties” and “natural principles” in The Japanese-English Vocabulary (1855-1858), “all creatures,” “the Cosmos,” “noumenon,” “the Creator,” “properties,” “principles of the Heaven and Earth” and “species” in the Pocket Dictionary of English-Japanese Translation Vocabulary (1862), and “instincts,” “qualities,” “the heavenly principle,” “the Creation,” “the Cosmos,” “the Great Wheel” and “all-inclusiveness” in Philosophical Vocabulary (1881). However, unlike early English-Chinese dictionaries, the Haruma Wage (the Japanese translation of Halma[’s Dictionary], 1796) had already adopted “shizen” as the Japanese equivalent of the Dutch word “natuur.” It is still unknown whether this translation influenced The Essentials of French (1864), which also translated the French word “nature” as “shizen” or “seishitsu” (properties). According to Yanabu Akira (1982), it was not until the second decade of the Meiji era that more and more English-Japanese dictionaries began to use “shizen” to indicate “nature” in Japanese (Akira, 1982: 127-148). As it reveals, compared to Chinese, Japanese identified “shizen” with “nature” much earlier, even if we trace the origin of this translation merely to the 1880s. Influenced by these dictionaries, Wang Rongbao, Ye Lan, and Chinese students who studied abroad in Japan complied and published New Erhya in 1903, which collected a broad spectrum of newly-coined Japanese terms and phrases and explained their meanings and usages in detail. It also included some nature-related words and expressions, such as “consistency of the ”, “natural science,” “natural force,” “natural origin,” “conditions for natural groups to evolve,” “physical person”, “natural selection,” “natural substance,” “natural philosophy”, “natural desire,” “naturalism,” and the like. The compilers intentionally divided “nature” into two categories, “natural creatures” and “natural force.” The former referred to various tangible natural creatures like birds, beasts, grass, and trees and the latter involved both primordial force and human force. Ziran, in this regard, started to be associated with “nature” as a substantive entity, which testified to the direct use of the Japanese

16 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 15(2)/2018: 13-29 word “shizen” by Chinese intellectuals to define and spread the idea of “nature” in the late-Qing period. (The third edition of New Erhya was published in 1906) On this account, it is reasonable to claim that the introduction of “ziran” into the definition of “nature” in English-Chinese dictionaries at the turn of the 20th century was informed by Japanese reference books.

II. FROM “SUBSTANCES”, “PRINCIPLES”, AND “PHYSICAL ENERGY” TO “NATURE”: THE MATERIALIZATION OF “NATURE” IN LATE-QING NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENTIFIC STUDIES

Compared to the concept of “nature” in the Western context, “ziran,” as a traditional Chinese notion, has its own distinctive features. In the Western tradition, the Latin word “nature” derived from “physics” in Greek, which denoted physical entities in the material world as well as the growth and nature of living things. By contrast, in ancient China, “ziran” mainly indicated the operational mode of all species and the movement of the universe or the “Heaven and Earth,” hardly referring to any physical objects until much later. According to the research by Japanese sinologists, there existed a substantial difference between the Western concept of “nature” and “ziran” or “shizen” in Chinese and Japanese context, as the former focused on external materials (this sense was further intensified in modern times) and the latter highlighted the instinctive and spontaneous nature of substances. If the most appropriate definition of “nature” for Europeans is entity, in Daoism, it explicitly pointed to the inherent nature of the universe, namely spontaneity. Even though both sides had the notion of “nature” in a material sense, a remarkable difference lay in their premises. As a consequence, when implying inartificiality, “nature” and “ziran” also significantly differed from each other (Hiroshi, 2003: 38-46). Nevertheless, after being integrated with its Western counterpart, the Chinese outlook on “nature” underwent drastic changes in various fields, not limited to philosophical thinking. Encompassed by the concept of “natural science” (and technology), “nature” became the sublime object of all scientific and technological studies. This new implication of “ziran” did not emerge at the beginning, but experienced a long process of reiteration and reinterpretation by Chinese scholars. In the academic arena, it switched its

17 Zhongjiang WANG / How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved… focus from natural philosophy to natural science, and in the scope of the objective world, its translation changed from “substances,” “principles”, and “physical energy” to “nature.” During this process, the overarching and commonly accepted meaning of “nature” was formed as in the cases of “natural world”, “Mother Nature”, “natural phenomena” and “the law of nature.” In the same process, the Western concept of “nature” was domesticated in modern China and simultaneously the traditional Chinese idea of “ziran” managed to realize its rebirth and reform. In truth, “nature” originally had the implication of substantiality, and when it was employed to represent the entire physical world and the research object of science and technology in modern times, this implication was irrevocably reinforced. In the late , “substances” and “principles” were regarded as the main subjects of natural philosophy and thus ascribed to two different disciplines for careful investigation. During this time period, the natural philosophy, in a broad sense, extensively covered the knowledge area of natural sciences and applied technologies. Relevant evidence can be found in Y. J. Allen’s Record of the Founding of the Gezhi Academy in Shanghai (1874) and Chen ’s Book of Use (Yong Shu), which mentioned “natural philosophy” under the headlines of “electrics” and “physics” and classified it into astronomy, geology, chemistry, mechanism, optics, botany, and practical techniques. The broader the coverage of natural philosophy was, the more specialized its “substances” and “principles” would be. On the contrary, if its scope shrank, the subjects of its “substances” and “principles” would be accordingly reduced. Hence the natural philosophy in its narrow sense merely covered natural sciences and the corresponding substances and principles. For instance, Zheng Guanying divided “intelligence” into “sciences” and “technologies” and drew a clear distinction between them, so did Zhang Heling. The classification of natural philosophy made by Xu Weize in his Enlarged Version of the Bibliographies for Eastern and Western Studies also excluded technology. In terms of this classification, “substance” and “principle” existed in both science and technology. The narrowest definition of natural philosophy in the late-Qing period only referred to physics and chemistry, or even physics alone. Therefore, the scope of the substances and principles it involved were most limited. For example, only physics was listed in the category of natural philosophy in The List of Translated and Printed Books by the Bureau of Shanghai Mechanical and Electrical Industries.

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Another consequence brought by the introduction of Western natural philosophy to the concept of “substances” and “principles” in the late Qing dynasty was that by comparing the natural philosophy of ancient China with its Western counterpart, Chinese intellectuals began to recognize the advantages of the latter and thus proposed to adopt new methods to examine the “substances” and “principles” of the world for a thorough understanding of their secrets and a good mastery of them. In this connection, it was the missionaries who took the lead to introduce Western natural philosophy into China. Enlightened by them, Chinese intellectuals also devoted themselves to the spread and application of the new research paradigm it embodied. As A. Williamson (1829-1880) claimed in his article entitled “On Natural Philosophy,” the strength of a state hinged on its people, the strength of its people hinged on a full- grown mind, and the strength of the mind hinged on natural sciences; however, in China the scientific spirit was weak and not applied in a proper way. His opinion was shared by W. Muirhead (1822-1900), who criticized both China and the West in pre-modern time for their conformity to ancient teachings and celebrated Francis Bacon as the pioneer who broke new ground. G. Reid (1857-1927), on the other hand, pointed out the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western learning and insisted that China should imitate the example of Western natural sciences since its own philosophy had already degenerated into “empty talk” rather than a “practical knowledge area.” Holding a similar view, Chinese intellectuals of the late-Qing period also denounced traditional Chinese natural philosophy as a hollow sham that merely centered on the principle of righteousness, neglecting that of substances, and lacked experimental and empirical approaches. Among all the arguments that compared Chinese natural philosophy with its Western counterpart and regarded the substances and principles of nature as its research objects, that made by Yan Fu turned out to be the most representative one. On one hand, he criticized thinkers of the Self- Strengthening Movement for their proposal of “Chinese learning for the foundation and Western leaning for practical uses” and advocated a holistic embrace of Western ideas and the application of scientific methods to both nature and the society. On the other hand, he agreed with these thinkers on the point that the prosperity of a nation depends on the progress of scientific researches and thus accused traditional Chinese scholars for their ignorance of the natural world and preoccupation with

19 Zhongjiang WANG / How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved… outdated knowledge. Overall, the transformation of the notion of “substances” and “principles” caused by the introduction of modern sciences and their research methods unfolded in two aspects. For one thing, new approaches like observation, induction, and experimentation were celebrated in the studies of “substances” and “principles.” For another, “substances” and “principles,” as the research objects of Chinese natural philosophy, broke away from the bondage of social morals, human affairs and ethical codes (it was this bondage that incurred Shih’s criticism against traditional Chinese perspectives on nature) and switched to the natural world. From then on, the concept of “ziran” inherent in Chinese cultural traditions was eventually materialized to become the primary target of natural sciences and technologies under the Western influence. As a result, the idea of “nature” as a material entity in modern China was characterized by a tinge of mechanistic thinking.

III. THE INTEGRATION OF HEAVEN, INBORN FORM, SPONTANEITY AND “NATURE” IN THE LATE QING DYNASTY

In modern China, the acceptance of the Western idea of “nature” coincided with the development of instrumental rationality. Nevertheless, this coincidence only represented one single facet of the integration of “ziran” with “nature”. Another facet of this integration lay in the fact that the way taken by the West to interpret the world by of “nature” per se rather than any “supernatural” forces corresponded with that of ancient China as the existence and the movement of the cosmos were explained with the Chinese indigenous belief in “spontaneity.” Generally speaking, this new understanding of “nature” that appeared in the West in modern times was referred to as “naturalism.” Therefore, though they have a much longer history, similar perceptions deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture could be called “naturalism” as well. Alexander Williamson, a Scottish missionary who was affiliated with the London evangelical church and dispatched to China in the mid 19th century, had an in-depth understanding of “ziran” in the sense of “spontaneity.” Obviously, due to his special identity, he was subject to neither the modern Western concept of “naturalism” nor the interpretation of the world based on the Chinese tradition of “ziran,”

20 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 15(2)/2018: 13-29 since they both contradicted his religious belief in the divine creation by God. In 1857, he published his “Zhendao Shizheng” (Genuine Evidence for the True Belief) in installments and gave each section a specific heading (, 2006). As a matter of fact, the English title of this article was “Natural Theology,” a synonym of “natural religion” or “rational theology.” By using the word “natural,” Williamson intended to demonstrate the existence of God and his omniscience and omnipotence in terms of human reason instead of mysterious revelation. In “Zhendao Shizheng,” he claimed the cosmos to be created by God in a natural way. The word “nature,” as he implied, was similar to that of Chinese Daoism and modern Western philosophy. However, the most fundamental question is whose “nature” is this? Daoism and the naturalism of modern Europe both celebrated the nature of the material world and denied any form of supernatural powers, constituting two sides of the same coin. In Williamson’s opinion, however, the existence of God served as the premise of nature, which gave form to God’s inherent quality and absolute being. Therefore, he denied going beyond God and using the “nature” per se to interpret the world. As he argued, if human bodies and organs were formed naturally, they must be out of order; now that our limbs and viscera were well-organized and delicately produced, it must be God who made this arrangement. Taking “spontaneity” as the nature of God, Williamson rejected “ziran” and “the Dao,” two key concepts of Daoism as well as “tai chi” (the great harmony) proposed by and other Confucian scholars as an absolute object. In contrast, the American missionary W. A. P. Martin (1827-1916) borrowed the concept of “inherent spontaneity” from ancient Chinese philosophy to interpret the “nature” of the West. Unlike Williamson, who defied ziran in the Chinese cultural context by virtue of the “nature” of God, he combined these two intellectual traditions together and used one to explain the other, as was typified by his integration of the Chinese “natural law” with its Western counterpart. “Natural law,” in the Western context, was also called “the law of God” and considered as the highest and the most fundamental law established by God. When he translated Wanguo Gongfa (Law of Nations, namely The International Law by Henry Wheaton) from English to Chinese, he mentioned the idea “natural law” and equated it to “instinct” or “heaven.” Hence the names “instinctive law” and “heavenly law.” As Martin further explained, the so-called “instinctive law” “referred to nothing else but the rules naturally observed by all

21 Zhongjiang WANG / How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved… people and thus bore the name of ‘heavenly law.’” Sometimes, he tended to translate “natural” as “ziran de” and “natural law” as “ziran de .” In comparison, the “statutory law” among nations (universally known as “international law”), as opposed to “natural law,” was named “public law” by him (Hu, 1998: 198-225). In fact, Wheaton also brought forward the idea of “natural law” but did not embrace it as enthusiastically as Martin, who regarded “natural law” as the foundation of international statutory law and ascribed the universality of the latter to the former, or “heavenly principles” in his own words (Wheaton, 2002: 2, 8). It turned out that Martin adopted such traditional Chinese concepts as instinct, heaven, heavenly principles, and spontaneity to explain the Western notion of “nature” and “natural law.” As he discussed “natural law” from the perspective of ancient China, he claimed that China had already established a legal system resembling the public law and natural law in the West and was accordingly more susceptible to the codes of the Christian world. To support his argument, he quoted from the covenant signed between the state of Zheng and other vassal states in 562 BC, in which all states resorted to natural gods, ancestral gods, and the highest “God” to maintain their efficacy and authority. Those Chinese intellectuals who collaborated with Martin in the late Qing dynasty did not recognize a Western Christian spirit in the “instinctive law” and “natural law,” but tended to view them as the embodiment of the necessity of the Dao(necessity of heavenly principles): “the public law does not work for a certain state or a certain time period, but informs people of all states across the five continents; based on the necessity of heavenly principles, it was discussed by great thinkers in past times and overwhelmingly acknowledged as the principle of international affairs, not by accident but in an inevitable way.”(Duanfang, 1904) This statement, among other things, reflected how Chinese people at that time applied the “natural law” or the “necessity of heavenly principles” inherent to China to justify the legitimacy of international law. The “necessity of heavenly principles,” back into history, was celebrated by the neo-Confucianists of the Song and Ming dynasties as the highest moral standard. In transmitting the indigenous idea of “ziran” and simultaneously reconciling it with the modern Western concept of “nature,” three Chinese thinkers of the late-Qing and early-republican period, namely Yan Fu, Zhang Taiyan, and , turned out to be leading pioneers. Yan regularly recruited “instinct,” “heaven” and “inborn form” to interpret

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“nature” in the Western context, as in the case of translating “natural selection” as “tianze” (selection by heaven). Another notable example was that in order to foreground the “inevitability” and “universality” of evolution, he rendered “evolution” as “the change of heaven” and endowed it with a sense of world view. In Evolution and by , the adjective “natural” and “natural state” were both key words with the latter in particular repeatedly haunting the text. Instead of “man-made,” “manpower,” “artificial selection” and “rule by man”, Yan preferred to identify “nature” and “natural selection” with “the operation of heaven” and “heavenly principles.” Apparently, in his opinion, the Chinese character “tian” (heaven) was the most qualified equivalent of “nature” in Darwin, Spencer and Huxley’s sense. Since tian had the implication of “spontaneity,” there is little wonder that “natural” and “natural selection” were respectively translated as “ziran de” and “ziran xuanze” in early English-Chinese dictionaries. On this account, there existed no contradictions between “selection by heaven” and “natural selection” in Yan Fu’s mindset of evolutionism, as he equated “heaven” to “nature” and integrated “nature” and “natural” with not only “heaven” and “heavenly,” but also the traditional notion of “ziran.” Although Zhang Taiyan’s thought was incompatible with the proposals of Yan Fu in many aspects, his understanding of “heaven” and “nature” shared the same ground with Yan Fu’s translation. As far as he was concerned, heaven, not unlike the Dao and “ziran,” was by no means something substantive and supernatural, but stood for the spontaneity of the emergence and variation of all creatures driven by their inner dynamics. By citing ’s (369-286 BC) statement that “the sounds are produced according to their individual capacities, and who is it that agitates their breasts” and ’s (27-97 AD) conclusion that “heaven and earth join their breaths and then all creatures come into being by themselves,” he attributed the birth of the universe to its own impulse rather than the creation by God. As for the reason why things could automatically emerge and evolve, Zhang employed the western concept of “atom” to illuminate the inner dynamics of the world, arguing that the atom, as everything’s essential element, possessed both good and evil powers and underpinned the creation and evolution of all things. Though influenced by modern atomism and the theory of ethers, he cast off the perspective of mechanism and disavowed the existence of a clear distinction between organic and inorganic substances, which, as he

23 Zhongjiang WANG / How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved… pointed out, differed from each other just because they were at different stages of evolution. On the other hand, life, according to Zhang Taiyan, originated from a primal impulse that pervaded the universe. Zhang thereby denied creationism, the mandate of heaven as well as fatalism that subjugated the destiny of human beings to the will of heaven. His idea of “ziran” was further developed as he adopted the Buddhist concepts of “nothingness” and “mind only” in his later works. Hu Shih agreed with Zhang Taiyan on his early outlook on “ziran” that explained the world and all creatures in terms of their own natures and denied the existence of any supernatural powers. As the leader of the Chinese intelligentsia at the turn of the 20th century, Hu strongly advocated “a movement of naturalism” in modern China and proposed the slogan of “naturalism as a living philosophy.” The “naturalism” he called for was a combination of Western culture and Chinese long-existing tradition. In his eyes, these two intellectual trends both approached the cosmos with the notions of “spontaneity” and “nature” and negated various supernatural beings or forces. As Hu Shih suggested, the naturalism of the West was mainly a product of modern sciences, and on the very basis of modern sciences, he made a philosophical conclusion that the cosmos and all creatures were formed on their own. The naturalism Hu drew from modern sciences was definitely inconsistent with the concept of “ziran” in ancient Daoism. Nevertheless, what he emphasized was the reconciliation of them in the sense of spontaneity and its functions, as he attempted to form a united front between them to resist diverse supernatural beings, religious deities, and superstitions in both China and the West. Despite his acknowledgment of the inherent naturalist tendency of Daoism, Hu also criticized Daoism for its excessive celebration of natural objects without exploring or making full use of nature. It is evident that “nature,” in Hu Shih’s sense, primarily referred to substantive and physical entities, which constituted a major difference between the Western naturalism and its Taoist counterpart. In summary, among the missionaries and in modern China, the traditional Chinese notions of “heaven,” “inborn form” and “nature” that derived from the nature of the cosmos were disavowed as the opposite side of creationism, or embraced for their combination of the law of God in the West with the instinctive law and natural law of ancient China, or employed as the ultimate basis for the explanation of the world and the exclusion of supernatural powers. Differing from a substantialized “nature”

24 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 15(2)/2018: 13-29 in the Western context, the “nature” of modern China resulted from the resurrection of such traditional ideas as “tian,” “tianran,” and “ziran.” During this process, the modern Western culture as represented by naturalism merged with Chinese cultural traditions.

IV. NATURE: HUMANITIES, LIFE, AND SPIRIT

With the hypostatization of the concept of “nature” at the end of the Qing dynasty and the employment of substances, physics, energies, and materials as the components of “nature” and the objects of scientific and technological studies, modern China also witnessed the formation of a mechanistic, scientific, material-bound and causality-oriented outlook on nature (Collingwood, 1960: 114-124; Westfall, 2000). At the same time, as opposed to this materialistic perspective, there also emerged an overwhelming trend of comprehending “nature” by virtue of humanities, life and spirit. The confrontation of these two standpoints was epitomized by the so-called “Debate between Science and ” in 1923, as two opposing camps presented divergent understandings of “nature”: one was mechanistic and the other was humanistic. A multitude of elements and materials involved in this debate, in both intellectual and historical senses, had a conspicuous European background. The mechanistic, materialistic and scientific outlook on nature was formed as a result of the interaction among modern European science, philosophy, technology, industrial civilization, and so on, which dominated over the intellectual world and received vehement criticism from literary romanticists and philosophical vitalists. As it objectified nature for the sake of scientific research and technological reform, the romanticists and vitalists approached nature from a concrete, aesthetic, holistic, organic, life-oriented, humanistic and spiritual perspective, for whom, “nature” was not only the object of science and technology, but also a spiritual being laden with humanities and life. Inspired by Western mechanistic worldviews, Chinese scientists of the late-Qing and early republican period, from Yan Fu, who introduced social Darwinism into China, to Hu Shih, Wu Zhihui (1865-1953), (1887-1936), Wang Xinggong (1888-1949), and , all claimed “nature” as a mere object of science and technology, though in different ways. However, some other scholars, including Liang Qichao (1873-1929), Zhang Junmai (1887-1969), Du Yaquan (1873-1933), Liang

25 Zhongjiang WANG / How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved…

Shuming (1893-1988), Fang Dongmei (1899-1977), and He Lin (1902- 1992) questioned and denounced this stance in terms of humanities, life, and spirit. It should be noted that the latter group of intellectuals (except for Gu Hongming and Ma Yifu) also supported scientific researches on “nature” and advocated processing, transforming and making use of it, insisting that China should develop its own natural science and technology. What they opposed was a unitary worldview informed by scientism, materialism and mechanism. For instance, Liang Qichao rejected Hu Shih’s glorification of science as something almighty; Liang Shuming also pointed out that science only took effect in the “physical” aspect of nature, unable to deal with its “spiritual” issues, let alone the meaning and value of human life. As for materialism, in Zhang Junmai’s words, it prevailed in 17th-and-18th- century Europe and took on different features as time went by; though naturally embraced by Chinese intellectuals as a practical theory for the sake of social revolution, it would soon become outdated. Zhang then stressed that not everything was made up of materials and therefore materials could not be recruited to explain things like life and mind, let alone social morals. Quoting from J. A. Thomson (1861—1933), he attached particular importance to philosophy, fine art, and religion that exceeded the bounds of scientific knowledge and methods, since physics merely regarded substances and energies as the origin of the world with little concern about whether it had an ultimate purpose or not, whereas philosophy probed into issues more significant than dynamics or genetics and remarkably differed from physics and biology in the way of interpreting the world. As Zhang insisted, due to the existence of human emotions, mankind should not only know about nature as in sciences, but also enjoy it as in arts. Fang Dongmei also claimed that the shift of focus from religion in the middle ages to natural sciences in the modern era manifested a revolutionary change as opposed to the medieval custom of repudiating nature and human desires. In Fang’s opinion, this cultural turn, along with the notions of absolute equality and individuality it ushered in, facilitated the exploitation of nature and enriched the material life of human beings. Nevertheless, embodying a scientistic and mechanistic outlook on nature, it identified “nature” with materials and reduced it to a machine or a mere product of causality, depriving it of sentiments and spirituality. That was

26 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 15(2)/2018: 13-29 why the value of philosophy and art could not be denied. Unlike science and technology, which focused on the material dimension of nature, philosophy discussed nature in terms of life and emotions and accordingly approximated to art and poetry. Placed in a humanized nature informed by philosophy, poetry, and a transcendental view of life, mankind could merge with the universe and all creatures. When examining the relationship between the biotic nature and the materialistic nature, most Chinese humanists endorsed Darwinism and thus recognized that life evolved from inorganic to organic substances. For example, Du Yaquan divided all worldly things into three types, substances, lives, and spirits, which constituted the whole phenomenal world and conveyed natural laws and principles. However, some organicists and vitalists objected to this evolutionist proposal, as its argument that the organic world derive from inanimate substances went against the philosophical materialism in A. N. Whitehead (1861-1947)’s sense. Keeping pace with the mechanistic and materialistic worldview that influenced China since the end of the Qing dynasty, an organistic, life- oriented outlook also made its debut, as the late-Qing and early republican period witnessed Tan Sitong’s (1865-1898) effort to combine life spirit with ethers and electrons, the emergence of Yan Fu’s concept of social organism and Sun Yat-Sen’s (1866-1925) “proto-life theory,” and the introduction of Bergson, H. Driesch, Whitehead’s vitalism and the so- called “vital philosophy” in the 1930s. During this process, Liang Shuming was an early representative who took the initiative to resist materialism in light of vitalism. He held the opinion that the philosophy of life had revealed the most effective way to overcome the materialization and fragmentation of modern worldviews and laid a particular emphasis on the vital and spiritual nature of the cosmos. From his point of view, the cosmos and nature were both life-informed beings: “in my thought, the most fundamental notions are “nature” and “life,” and in this sense I take the cosmos as something alive that conformed to nature.” (Liang, 1988: 106) As he argued, the cosmos and nature had not only life, but also spirit; this personification and spiritualization of nature formed an antithesis of the mechanistic outlook that completely materialized the world. Hence the question arose of whether the cosmos and nature were inherently animate or were they endowed with life by human beings. It was hard to answer this question with a simple yes or no.

27 Zhongjiang WANG / How the Concept of “Nature” Emerged and Evolved…

The confrontation of these two contrasting views on nature at the turn of the 20th century was deeply rooted in the inner contradictions of Western civilization, or more specifically, the reaction of humanism to scientism and the shift from a bifurcated understanding of nature to an integral whole. However, when transplanted into modern China, this confrontation was converted to that between the material civilization of the West and the spiritual civilization of the east, which, in the form of binary opposition, not only concealed the rise of such Western intellectual trends as romanticism, vitalism, anti-mechanism, and anti-scientism, but also brought about a severe misconception that the Western outlook on nature was epitomized by the divisions between nature and mankind and within nature itself, while the Chinese outlook on nature featured a union of man and nature. In actuality, this easy binarism was not justifiable even from the single perspective of the tortuous evolutionary trajectory of naturalism in modern China and its relationship with the Western thought.

V. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the introduction of the Western concept of “nature” into China and the transformation of the indigenous idea of “ziran” interacted with each other and together begot the modern Chinese outlook on nature. The former started from the translation of “nature” in English-Chinese dictionaries as the Chinese equivalent of “nature” varied from “xing” to “tiandi,” “tianran,” and eventually to “ziran,” whereas “natural” was translated as “ziran de” from the very beginning. With regard to the latter, it turned out to be the product of the fusion between the traditional Chinese idea of “nature” and its Western counterpart, which took on multifaceted and complicated appearances. Firstly, it reflected the materializing process of the traditional concept of “ziran” in modern China. Chinese thinkers used to employ such terms as “substances,” “physical principles,” “substances and energies,” and “self-evident truth” instead of “nature” to indicate the object of scientific and technological studies, and the use of “ziran” in the same sense began from the end of the Qing dynasty and prevailed in the early republican period. Secondly, it resulted from the interaction and integration of “ziran” with “nature” in the modern Western context. In this process, “heaven” (tian), “inborn form” (tianran), and other notions that were inherent in Chinese cultural traditions also played a large part. Thirdly, it featured the reinterpretation

28 Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology 15(2)/2018: 13-29 of “nature” in a humanistic and life-oriented sense, as opposed to the overwhelming tendency of mechanism and materialism. Generally speaking, with the unfolding of the aforementioned processes, the outlook on “nature” in modern China emerged and evolved with a tortuous trajectory.

Notes

Translated by Liu Chao, School of Foreign Languages, Southeast University.

References

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